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Ancestral Night

A White Space Novel

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Ancestral Night

By: Elizabeth Bear
Narrated by: Nneka Okoye
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About this listen

 A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Haimey Dz thinks she knows what she wants.
She thinks she knows who she is.
She is wrong.

A routine salvage mission uncovers evidence of a terrible crime and relics of a powerful ancient technology, just as Haimey and her small crew run afoul of pirates at the outer limits of the Milky Way and find themselves both on the run, and in possession of ancient, universe-changing technology.
When the authorities prove corrupt, it becomes clear that Haimey is the only one who can protect her galaxy-spanning civilisation from its potential power - and from the revolutionaries who want to use it to seed terror and war. But doing so will take her from the event horizon of the super-massive black hole at the galaxy's core to the infinite, empty spaces at its edge. Along the way, she'll have to uncover the secrets of ancient intelligences lost to time as well as her own lost secrets, which she will wish had remained hidden from her forever . . .

Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.

Praise for Elizabeth Bear

'Gripping, perfectly balanced, and highly recommended' Kirkus

'Like the best of speculative fiction, Bear has created a fascinating and complete universe
that blends high-tech gadgetry with Old World adventure and political collusion' Publishers Weekly©2019 Elizabeth Bear (P)2019 Orion Publishing Group Cyberpunk Dystopian Military Science Fiction Fiction Thought-Provoking Black Hole
All stars
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I struggled with this book. The ideas were engaging and some of the action flowed quite well but I kept getting thrown by things that didn’t seem quite right. If I were reading a physical book, I think I would have been flipping back constantly to check previous events to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood or misremembered things. I wanted to like it which is probably the best I can say. The narrator was marginal. She mostly sounded too young for the characters.

Uneven

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i really wanted to love this. it looked great from the blurb and it had some good ideas, but is really let down by the writing and narrator.

the first person style is quite annoying, so many tangents and self-conscious ‘to the reader’ asides which keep breaking the pace and immersion. it’s like a teenager writing a Dear Diary novel.

the narration is sadly as annoying as the writing, often misreading or mis-emphasising words and phrases which makes them difficult to parse.

sadly disappointing

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